Cashing in on the area's construction, Bazhong should be reachable from Chengdu and Chongqing within two hours by 2025, and within an hour and a half by 2035, according to He Ping, secretary of the Bazhong committee of the Communist Party of China.

Located in a mountainous area, Bazhong was made famous by a poem written by Li Shangyin, the late Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet who composed To My Family in the North on a Rainy Night in Nanjiang while he was on his way home to Shaanxi.

After overnight rain, the dirt roads through the mountains in Nanjiang had become inaccessible, leaving Li stranded for several days.

"You ask me when I will come back, but I don't know. The pools in Nanjiang with autumn rain overflow," he lamented in his famous poem.

The situation Li faced in the mid-ninth century remained unchanged until reform and opening-up began in the late 1970s.